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These poems are my grateful response to those who dream. To my own ancestors and family members, without whom I would not be alive to write these words. To the many women who, despite terrible circumstances, have refused to be silenced. To all those people who acknowledge the truth that political borders are nothing but imaginary lines drawn on a map. To those who feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and comfort the afflicted. Thank you so much. Now, more than ever, this world is needful of your compassion and hope. — Jeannine Pitas

An excerpt from the introduction to Thank You For Dreaming

In this powerful collection of poems, Jeannine Pitas lays bare the wounds of our time—the fractures in our understanding and compassion, the heartache of loneliness, the dissonance between our instincts and actions, the general chaos of our technologically advanced, spiritually degraded societies. In an effort to treat those wounds, thank you for dreaming stands in defiance of boundaries and unnecessary demarcations of difference; whether it is “aging teachers, early-morning office cleaners, executives sitting alone on a million dollars,” Frida Kahlo, Athena or God her/himself, the speaker of these poems reaches out in empathy and in love. These are poems in pursuit of connection, that seek to bridge the distance between the past and the present, between knowing and mystery, between the secular and the sacred. Pitas traverses the internal worlds of the soul and the external world of politics, environment, and technology, and brings the two spheres into dialogue with each other… These are poems that urge us to give up the preconceived notions that hold us hostage in our own ignorance, wisely pointing out the limitations of such living:

until I cross the river
naked
on a raft made of my own clothes
what can I say I know
(the line)

They invite us again and again to participate in a radical reaching toward those who are different, disenfranchised, and dismissed, and show us how in so doing, we are engaging in our own healing. They give us new commandments through which we can live our most fruitful and fulfilling lives.

AVAILABLE NOW!

For me, writing poetry is like solving, and then creating a puzzle. I see or experience things I know I want to write about, we all do. Figuring out a way to put those experiences on paper, so as to make them readable, is how one solves the puzzle. Avoiding straightforwardness and balancing on a knife edge, between enigmatic and readability, is how one creates the puzzle. I spent nearly three years revisiting, rewriting and re-getting pissed off at, The October Horse. I reference this poem so much because it is also almost entirely autobiographical (as is most of the book). I trudged through problems with addictions, like so many other 20 somethings, and I was maybe one or two bad decisions away from writing this book in prison (lucky me). The poem is so important to me because even when I was in the total animal soup of time (Ginsberg again!), I knew I wanted to write about that chapter of my life. — Alex Johnston

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To order by check, please make it out to Lummox Productions for $19 (USA) or $39 (WORLD) and send it to 3127 E. 6th St. Long Beach, CA 90814.

ISBN: 9780998458069
$12.95
48 pages
Trade/perfect bound
Chapbook

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To pay by check or money order, please make out to Lummox Productions, in the amount of either $15.95 (USA) or $22.95 (NON-USA) address it to LUMMOX and mail it to 3127 E. 6th St. Long Beach, CA 90814.An ECOPY is an electronic copy (PDF).

2 poems from Painless Life

Love and

We have air and we have water and even good coffee—the rest is neurosis…

(lovecan give time and love can certainly take timebut time only takes love)Someone’s knocking because the bell doesn’t work(and time will kill us,you and I,all,taking the bestaway)Someone’s knockingand the sound reminds me ofthe taste of my own tonguein my mouthIt’s youYou’re knocking because the bell doesn’t workI’ll answer it like an addictand look at you(and the sad Hawaiian shirt blue ceiling of the world behind you, as beautiful as a wall of butterfly wingsbut in that instant that you realize that the butterflies all had to die to be pinned there)my mouth full of ropeand tasting like my own tongueand my eyes stung with rusted mothsor dead butterfliesI will say(or roses that bloom after they are cutthat is,after they are deadas well)I will tell you(all I want is something appropriate to say when people ask me how I’ve been doing, how I’ve been, something that won’t sound false, something to say that won’t mention you)somethingstupid

sense

I sayI babble I mumble&I slip infront of a whole big Pile Of Myself& I speak I demonstrate:I keep Forgetting I still miss her

I sayI attesther lips so soft she wakes me like a HAT she could wear

I sayI demandbring us a pilotless ship

I say I pleadI am bound in joysthat nag us to emulate Parisdead in bloom;

I sayI speakI assertwrithing behind this precise curtain of meat

Bill Gainer’s world is not a safe place, not for the old men, not for him. It’s a place of mysterious things, happenings, people, and times. It’s a place where the mysteries of old men are told, not with guilt, but as they happened. The Mysterious Book of Old Man Poems tells of a time mostly past, not forgotten, but hidden away in the hearts of old men, its magic intact.

“Down the road, before I die, I want the ghostly poetic angel Bill Gainer to visit me and tell me all about the extraordinary place they’ve carved out in the afterlife for creative beings like him … The arrangement of his Old Man Poems is a fantastic reflection of mortal man through the eyes of a poet who can communicate like a playwright. This is a brilliant collection that should be accompanied by fireflies, a marathon night of piano playing by Tom Waits, a dancehall till dawn, some bourbon, and the warm breath of a lover’s before life flashes and as Gainer puts it, ‘time calls no more.’”

Daniel Yaryan ~ Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts

“A warm and gentle melancholy flows through this collection, in which the poems manage to be both intimate and conversational. They speak of aging and the passing of time; friends and lovers lost to the years. Yet even when the matter is dark, the pieces have an inherent playfulness and good humor. At the end of it you feel you’ve shared some heavy conversation and a good many beers with the old fellow down at the end of the bar. When they finally close it down and you have to go home, you might still feel a bit sad about the way of things, but you’ll be chuckling a bit as well.”

ISBN 978-0-9984580-5-26 X 9; 120 pages; Trade Paper$13.95

Ordering Info:

To pay by check/money order…PLEASE make the check out to LUMMOX PRODUCTIONS in the amount of $17.95 (USA – includes shipping & processing) or $35.95 (World – includes shipping and processing). Send to Lummox c/o 3127 E. 6th St. Long Beach, CA 90814.

To pay with credit/debit card…USE one of the PayPal buttons below (if you live in the USA, use that one, but your address must be in the USA or your purchase will be voided). If you want to order more than one copy, please contact me about the postage.

LUMMOX PRESS IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE WINNER OF THE 2017 LUMMOX POETRY CONTEST…Mary McGinnis of Santa Fe, New Mexico!! Her winning poem was “No Father”. As part of her prize, Mary received 30 copies of this chapbook. She also is featured in the 6th edition of the Lummox Poetry Anthology and receives a small cash prize.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

Mary McGinnis loves this world where we are, where “the first March ants can drift up your arm”; where “sassy women hold democracy up”; and “wells have never spoken before”. In one small chapbook, her poems move from lyrical to wildly imaginative, funny, and irreverent, to facing love, loss, and letting go. Lover and master of the acrostic poem, McGinnis is “an evangelist for words”. “Look for beauty, never forsake it,” Mary McGinnis exhorts us, “it will touch you like the breath of willow/ Even as earthquakes and deception fill the news, even as fascism/ eats at our hearts”….“it was a mountain all along that called me”.

Jane Lipman, Author of On the Back Porch of the Moon Winner of the 2013 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for Poetry Book and a 2013 NM Press Women’s Award

Mary McGinnis has been writing and living in New Mexico since 1972 where life connected her with emptiness, desert, and mountains. Besides being published in over 70 magazines and anthologies, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also has published three full length collections: Listening for Cactus (1996), October Again (2008), and See with Your Whole Body (2016). Most recently, she has had work in Kaleidoscope (2017), Lummox 6 (2017), and Malpais Review (2016). The publisher hopes that you will enjoy reading this new collection by this very talented poet.

To order a copy online use one of the buttons below…if you want the electronic version, click on the E-Copy button; if you are in the USA, use the second button (USA); if you out there beyond US borders, use the third button (WORLD). Shipping & Handling are included.

If you prefer to pay by check or money order, please add $1 (USA-$16 or World-$23) to cover processing and make it out to Lummox Productions and mail to Lummox c/o 3127 E. 6th St. Long Beach, CA 90814.

A DANCE AROUND THE CAULDRON — Prose by LINDA LERNER with Illustrations by DONNA JOY KERNESS

About the book:

Between 1692—93 twenty people were accused of being witches and executed in Salem Massachusetts. Nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill, and one elderly man was pressed to death by heavy stones after he wouldn’t enter a plea. Several others died in jail.

My purpose in this collection is not to retell what happened, which is widely known, or to give an account of Arthur Miller’s powerful, play, The Crucible. Instead, I’ve chosen to use his technique and blend characters together with people we know living among us.

What is going on now in this country makes it especially poignant for me, but to restrict it to that, is also too limiting. I see the situation as something ongoing, barely noticeable, until an accumulation of incidents makes it impossible to ignore, its darkness sweeps down on us, and we have no choice but to rise up and confront it.

400 years is next door, across the street, the place where you live and work; it is the distance between one neighbor and another. The village was called Salem then. Its villagers walk among us; they act like us. We do not recognize them. We prefer not to.
— from Linda Lerner’s introduction

Linda Lerner’s collection, Yes, the Ducks Were Real, was published by NYQ Books (Feb. 2015) as was her previous full-length collection, Takes Guts and Years Sometimes. A chapbook of poems inspired by nursery rhymes, illustrated by Donna Kerness, Ding Dong the Bell Pussy in the Well (Lummox Press, Feb. 2014.) She’s been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. In 1995 she and Andrew Gettler began Poets on the Line,the first poetry anthology on the Net for which she received two grants. In Spring, 2015 she read six poems on WBAI for Arts Express.

Donna Joy Kerness has been producing Art of various mediums over the years. Her inspirations have emerged from her past… She was a Dancer at The Henry Street Playhouse with Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, a casual fellow poet and friend of Linda Lerner, and an Underground Cinema Super Star in the movies of the Kuchar Brothers, during the Sixties in New York. After relocating to San Antonio and raising a family, now working with sketching , drawing and painting and multimedia Art which has been exhibited at the Highwire Gallery and the Candlelight Cafe, in San Antonio,Texas. Donna also did the Art work for Ding Dong the Bell, Pussy in the Well, by Linda Lerner, which was published by Lummox Press in 2014.

To order a copy online use one of the buttons below…if you want the electronic version, click on the E-Copy button; if you are in the USA, use the second button (USA); if you out there beyond US borders, use the third button (WORLD). Shipping & Handling are included.

If you prefer to pay by check or money order, please add $1 (USA-$16 or World-$23) to cover processing and make it out to Lummox Productions and mail to Lummox c/o 3127 E. 6th St. Long Beach, CA 90814.

WORLD (shipping incl.) $22

In Rot We Trust – Body Bag Nation Vol. 1

Text by Rob Plath and illustrations by Swedish artist, Janne Karlsson, seems like the work of two cadavers who refused to be dead and so they kicked their way out of their morgue drawers, beat the shit out of the grim reaper, danced on his bones, and then proceeded to scrawl poems and drawings on the cold, silent walls before escaping into the night. Don’t miss this chilling and humorous book filled with the mad graffiti of these two mortal bastards.

“I have been writing all my life. As a child in rural KY, I wrote long, highly derivative, doubtlessly horrible novels and intuitively mailed them to the only address I knew: my hillbilly transplant grandparents in Indiana. As an adult, I’ve been publishing poetry in the small presses for decades. I also suffer from anxiety and depression… when the “Great Recession” hit, I lost my car, my job, my place, and… my mind. I became so deeply depressed I even stopped writing for the first time ever. Several years later, when I started again, I found myself writing about my childhood; a topic I’d virtually never covered. And I found it very cathartic. This book grew, rather organically, out of that. I chose the title and cover because that old architectural oddity of a market is such a powerfully evocative symbol of that time and place for me.” — Ron Lucas

BIO

Ron Lucas is an autodidactic, former factory and warehouse laborer. He was born in kendallville, IN, raised in the rural, Appalachian mountains of South Eastern, KY, and attended Morehead State University. He lives in Fort Wayne, IN and spends the harsh Midwestern winters in Atlanta, GAwith his eldest child, an Emory University alumnus. His poetry has appeared in various publications for decades. This is his first collection.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:

“THE MOTHER GOOSE MARKET is high voltage poetry. This is poetry as poetry was meant to be experienced: the right word next to the right word; the right line next to the right line; the right poem next to the right poem. Nothing extra. Nothing wasted. Hell, this isn’t even poetry, this is an autopsy, a death-bed confession, a roadside bomb. This book was written to explode.” —Wolfgang Carstens, Epic Rites Press

Rd Armstrong‘s Lummox Press isn’t merely surviving, it’s forging ahead with a vengeance—with books like THE MOTHER GOOSE MARKET by Ron Lucas, Lummox Press continues to put out books of essential poetry. And by “essential poetry,” I mean you need to buy this book—you can thank me later.

ORDERING INFO:

The Mother Goose MarketISBN 978099845800730 Pages $12 + Shipping

If paying by check, make it out for $15 (USA) & $25 (WORLD) AND to Lummox Productionsand send to Lummox c/o PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733

USA (includes shipping) $14

WORLD (includes shipping) $24

CONGRATULATIONS TO GEORGIA SANTA MARIA – RECIPIENT of the 3rd LUMMOX POETRY PRIZE…This book is part of the prize.

I was introduced to dowsing by a neighbor in the 1970’s in Miami, New Mexico. It is the ancient art of finding water underground by using two sticks, either green twigs or pieces of wire. In the book, I introduce him in the poem “Dowser”. I watched him use both green elm and unbent coat-hangars. He held them out straight in front of him, and when he was over water, the sticks crossed and bent downward. A person with this skill is called a “water-witch”. My friend had “dowsed” most of the wells in our community over his seventy odd years of living there. He taught me to do it as well, and I can’t explain it, but the sticks turned in my hands spontaneously over the same places they did for him, and I could feel the tug.

Dowsing also works with electrical fields. The sticks will also cross under power lines or over underground water or power lines. Interestingly, my son, who was in Explosive Ordinance Detail in the Army, and was tasked with removing unexploded bombs, mines and other devices, often underground, said that he used dowsing to locate the devices in order to disable them. The dowsing rods were sensitive to the metal and electrical parts in the devices.

Using dowsing as a metaphor for how poetry comes to be written led me to the title of the book. Finding a poem is much like finding water underground: you never quite know where it will come from or where it may take you, but writing is an act of faith, much like turning your will over to a pair of green twigs.

Georgia Santa Maria

ABOUT THE BOOK

Georgia Santa Maria’s poems have a liveliness and earthiness one can only wish that more poems had. Her poems are inquisitive, curious about the world and its variety, and they express a mature but undiminished wonder for even human nature. Social critique is also one of her strengths— serious but never heavy handed. In her poem called “Women on the Money,” for example, Santa Maria asks
“And, while you might trust Rosa Parks,
to clean your house,
or raise your children,
why put her on the money, when
we didn’t even want to pay her, much—why do you think she was
riding the bus, anyway?”We need more poems like this one called “The Vegan Feminist Dilemma,” more poems that ask “Should I eat, or just become a vegan tart?” They make us laugh, and think, and feel a little more at home on the earth, which is something we need. Good poetry actually can make that happen. —Tony Hoagland

If you are interested in ordering more than 1 copy contact Lummox here.If you want a bookstore price or to set up a reading/signing contact.

ORDERING INFORMATION:To order by mail, make out your check for $16 (USA) or $24 (WORLD); to Lummox Productions and mail to Lummox c/o PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733To use your debit/credit card to order Via PayPal, use the appropriate button below.